Customer Personas

Sean Byrnes | January 30, 2017

Thanks to reader Yash for asking about Personas and inspiring this week’s content! If you have topics you’d like us to cover, please drop me a line.

Not all customers are the same, which is why we need data in the first place! If your business is successful you will have a large number of customers, each with different needs and interests, which can make it hard to understand what your customers want in aggregate. How do you build marketing strategies and plans for hundreds of different customers?

Customer personas make it easier to handle such diverse groups of customers by identifying the common traits shared by large groups of customers and creating simple profiles. These personas are customer profiles that represent large segments of your customers and will make your decision making easier, since it will be easier to test a given strategy against a known persona than hundreds of individual customers.

For example, if you sell tables online and have a large number of customers that are female and living in California, you might create a persona of a California woman named Beth who loves furniture. Beth is not a real person, but her persona shares common traits with many of your existing customers and hence Beth can be used to represent their interests. When you consider product changes and marketing campaigns, you can view them through the eyes of Beth and consider how she, as a proxy for your customers, might respond.

How do you build your customer personas and how do you know they are representative of your customers? We will cover some techniques this week, including: